The Memory Book

On Friday night we ran a little event at Central School of Speech Drama. The main purpose of it was to try and experiment with a new kind of space for artists to play in. A bustling little hub in which video installations, audio experiences, one on one encounters and other miniature events could co-exist. A space somewhere between a gallery and a theatre and a party.

You could have Brian Lobel buy a minute of your time, or Debbie Pearson tell you about the music that's been ruined for her by dating, or see a brilliantly disturbing video installation by Charlotte Jarvis, tell Jo Bannon about your claim to fame, have a five minute relationship with Mamoru Iriguchi. We had the first realisation of a travelling audio library that we are working on building. We had a beautiful night time balcony gig by Little Bulb. We had Greg McLaren hidden in a corner of the building. It was a lovely evening and it will hopefully become the basis for a series of exciting events we're hoping to make happen in the Spring across the country.

One of the little pieces we had there was a new collaborative piece by us at Forest Fringe.

We laid out a diary and asked people to contribute a memory for each day of the year. Here are a collection of those that we got.

March 1

This is the beginning of the month where I celebrate the year anniversary of my first love.

March 28

I woke up.

May 6

First kiss of many - in fact, the first kiss and the last time I kissed anyone else.

May 16

Today the first seed sprouted. That made me hopeful, even though I'd spilled the seed tray on the floor.

July 4

My first child was born on July 4. It was a hot night - all the windows were open. She was delivered by a U.S. student - his first delivery. He looked stunned and amazed.

August 1

A year ago today I watched the sun set + rise again over the mount ridges of New Mexico.

August 19

We had a party in a cave for the most delightful of ladies.

September 3

Today I was the recipient of fellatio on a public bus. Teenage wet dream? I was worried terribly that someone would turn around. What would I say? No one did.

September 9

I had an abortion.

November 10

My mother was born in 1947. She is a great woman. She deserves a lot more love than she gets but sometimes she shoots herself in the foot. What an interesting mind. I want so much to giver her the world but in so many ways she wouldn't take it.

November 13

I am thinking of you right now, and I wish I wasn't. I wish it wasn't like this and that it may of ended differently. Who knows what would of happened. But I feel that it shouldn't of happened this way.

November 28

CJ had a one night stand in Manor House.

December 10

After he'd forgotten my birthday for the 3rd time I tried to kill myself. I failed. He's gone. HAPPY BIRTHDAY! :)

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Hopefully we can continue to add to the Memory Book as we go and maybe have a full year of memories by Edinburgh to have on display for people during the festival. If you want to contribute something just email us via our website or put something in the comments.

Peter Brook Empty Space Award

Some delightful news for the beginning of maybe the year's most depressing month (it's cold, it's not Christmas and the only thing to celebrate is the ineptitude of some 400 year old Catholics) - today Forest Fringe became the 20th winners of the Peter Brook Empty Space Award.

It was genuinely a total surprise considering the inspiring companies shortlisted - BAC, Soho, The Arches, the Bush and the Minerva. I also got to shake Peter Brook's old man hand. WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT FROM A DAY?

At the ceremony, Dominic Cavendish of the Telegraph had some lovely things to say about us so I thought I'd post them here for you all to have a read:

Who knows how this decade will come to be written about in the years ahead? It may well be viewed as a wretched one but perhaps it might be seen as positively halcyon compared to what will follow. One thing's for sure - it started with anxiety about a tech-driven financial bust that proved unfounded and ended with the real deal, the kind of recession that carves itself into people's lives for a long time. In the end, the big theme wasn't war or the clash of civilisations but the one that's never really been out of currency - money.

Money was the making of theatre this decade - there was a lot more of it to prop up the subsidised sector, and even if you couldn't exactly point to a golden time in the West End in terms of art, it was certainly a gilded one. Yet now that the whole house of cards has fallen down, it's probably time for theatre-makers further down the chain, who are most exposed to the vagaries of the economic climate, to say that if they're being forced to beg, borrow or even steal to survive, then 'twas ever thus - because so-called boom years had their downside, too, in keeping costs high, and curtailing unprofitable experimentation.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Edinburgh Fringe where spiralling rental charges have conspired to restrict the affordability of a festival that is supposed to be the greatest artistic free-for-all on earth. I've seen at first hand how deranged the economics of bringing up just a relatively straightforward monologue are, even during a downturn; the risks of working on a more ambitious scale seem to grow by the year.

Which is where one has to salute with all the force of a Tattoo gun at midnight the efforts of the team behind Forest Fringe, which has in the space of a few years become an essential fixture at Edinburgh without actually joining itself to the Fringe as such. In its adopted church hall venue at Bristo Place, it operates not merely, prosaically, as a festival within a festival - but as a sort of other world, a boundary-pushing playground where, thanks to multiple volunteer efforts it's not the money that counts at all, but the stuff that happens between performers and their makeshift surroundings and between performers and curious visitors. If I could have wished away the hundreds of other chores that descend on a journalist while covering the festival, I'd have happily hung out at Forest Fringe for the entirety of its duration.

It seems to me that in its back-to-basics approach, it is totally forward-thinking - and potentially revolutionary in scope. Whatever the next decade holds, the seeds of the next wave of theatre - and probably even of our recover itself, lie in the expansive, inexpensive miracle that is Forest Fringe.

Thanks to everyone, artists, audiences, supporters in all their various guises, who have been a part of Forest Fringe. All of you have been totally integral to getting us to the point when such flattering things can be said about us and where we can win such long-standing and well-regarded awards.

The £2000 that is the prize for this award will go a long way to realising some of the plans we have for next year - audio libraries, microfestivals rearing up across the country and of course once again looking to re-imagine and remake our place within the Edinburgh Festival season. But more on all of that very soon...!

Late Night Notes

I don't have a desk in my room, only a too-low table in front of a sofa with a laptop on it. Around it is sprayed the following in a semi circle moving anti-clockwise:

A jacket given to me by a friend
A copy of Raw Notes by Claes Oldenburg

A series of installation CDs for the laptop which I had to reformat last week, losing everything on it

A note from a young theatre company in an old-fashioned air-mail envelope

The notes from a presentation I gave two weeks ago
A letter from O2
An empty bottle of red wine on its side
A digital alarm clock
My driving license
An empty can of coke
A handwritten to-do list for this week, 80% crossed out
A small blue pen of the kind I imagine they use in betting shops
5p
An empty packet of wriggley's chewin gum
A CD of show that I have half-watched
A plate containing the crumbs of a peanut butter and banana sandwich
A copy of Arkive City, open at an article by Paul Clarke
An unopen copy of In Comes I by Mike Pearson
An old, yellowing copy of From Russia With Love, face down and splayed open at the page I last read
A padded envelope
A copy of Alex Kelly and Annie Lloyd's The Dust Archive

A copy of Art into Theatre
A programme from a show at BAC
An A4 notepad with nothing written on it
My laptop case

If you took the laptop out of the room these items would form a perfect splatter around it, marking where it once sat - like the silhouette formed in ice cream when someone is shot in the film Bugsy Malone.

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The signature on my email at the moment is a lovely quotation from Lyn Gardner from over two years ago in which she said that Forest Fringe 'should revolutionise the fringe'

I just got an email from a friend of mine that simply said, in electric pink font:

So when are you going to stop fucking around and revolutionise the fringe then?

A good question.

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I can't stop listening to Pictures of You by The Cure. It's addictively desolate, especially at ten past one in an otherwise silent house.

Drowning in a sea of very tiny light bulbs

Ok. So picture this.

It’s five in the morning. You’ve been up for about 42 of the last 48 hours. In that time you’ve seen three spectacularly beautiful shows, one that passed you by in the moment but when you attempt to explain it to someone in two weeks time it will have become your favourite of the entire festival, an inadvisable comedy show with the soul destroying title ‘LOLacaust: The Musical’, a miniature encounter that made you cry in a good way, four pieces of paint-by-numbers devised theatre all of which involved a movement sequence to a Sufjan Stevens song and an outdoor show that would have been euphoric if it hadn’t been raining. You’re sitting in the corner of an overcrowded bar trying to hear the music over the raised voices around you. Big, exhausted thoughts chug lazily through your head, floating around aimlessly for a while before disappearing again. You are the fuzzy silence at the end of an old cassette tape.

Suddenly though, smuggled in amidst all the floatsam, is something different. An idea. A really, really good one. Though initially tiny it quickly expands, filling the inside of your head, bleeding out into everything you see around you. Now you're no longer gazing vacantly off into space, you're frantic - scrambling to find a pen and a piece of paper and somehow anchor it down before it disappears.

So there it is. An a fragile, wonderful idea caught in a series of frantic scribbles on the back of somebody else's programme. Brilliant. And then what?

Well, traditionally not a lot in Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a place for showing not for making. For all that it is crammed to the point of delirium with spaces for putting on shows, there’s virtually nowhere to actually create something, to try anything out – in public or in private.

To me that just feels like such a crushing waste. Here is a city overflowing with potential collaborators, with supportive, generous producers and critics and audiences, with unusual spaces. With brilliant people doing nothing all day other than handing out flyers and sitting in their flats watching episodes of the Wire to try and avoid spending any more money. This bizarre month of excitement and inertia could (should) be the perfect environment for not only having a good idea but for pinning it down, for allowing it to take its first steps.

When BAC first created the One o clock Scratch back in 2005 it was a revelation. An opportunity for artists at the festival to try out a new project in front of an audience. The TEAM, Third Angel, Rabbit and dozens more created work there that blossomed into a whole family of brilliantly diverse, successful pieces. When it returned to the festival last year at Forest Fringe you could again feel the giddy excitement of the artists given this space and the audience who would have the opportunity to see what came out of it.

For us at Forest Fringe, that model (and the collective excitement generated from it) continues to be an inspiration. We want to provide more space and more time than ever before for new ideas to prosper.

We’re devoting a whole day at the end of the August to things dreamt up in bars and on walks and in conversations over the course of the festival. But more than that, we’ve tried to encourage a whole host of diverse opportunities for artists at Forest Fringe to explore a new idea – whatever form that idea might take. And so we have platforms in which a new idea can become an interactive experience, or a brief one-on-one encounter or piece of new writing. Hopefully almost anything, no matter how strange, will find the right space in which to happen. Because its often not just about providing a space and a platform, but ensuring that its the right way for an idea to be realised.

We're hoping that some, many even, of these small sparks will end up growing into full projects that come back to Forest Fringe next year. Or maybe they will have found their perfect incarnation first time around. Either way I'm excited to be able to say that I have no idea what what's going to happen.

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Places for new ideas at Fores Fringe this summer:

The Miniaturists

24 & 25 August

Stephen Sharkey and Glynn Cannon programme a series of brilliantly diverse pieces of new writing, all of which have to be less than 20 minutes long. A celebration of the fact that even the smallest piece of written can deserve realising with all the effort and creativity of a full play.

Hide&Seek Sandpit

26 August

The brilliant people behind the Hide&Seek festival will be bringing their unique brand of social games & playful experiences to Forest Fringe. Strange interactive experiences scattered across the building and disappearing out into the streets around it.

BAC One o Clock Scratch

22 & 29 August

BAC’s legendary fringe forum for new ideas. See up to five different artists trying out 10-minute skits of brand new ideas. The birthplace of work by The TEAM, Third Angel and Rabbit amongst many others.

Stoke Newington International Airport’s Live Art Speed Dating

26 August

The boys from STK International, East London’s newest and bestest venue, are going to be filling the building with brand new 4 minute one-on-one encounters by some of the most exciting artists at the festival. See as many as you can.

BAC Nuit Blanche

24 August (Scratch Sharing the next morning)

BAC will be offering artists a chance to take part in a unique all-night residency at Forest Fringe, hoping that the peace, quiet and delirious creativity of the middle of the night will mean that there will be something memorable to see by morning. Artists interested can send ideas and pitches to lauram[at]bac.org.uk, using the subject line Nuit Blanche and anyone can come for breakfast and a sunrise Scratch sharing, followed by a group walk up Arthur's Seat.

Forest Fringe’s Great Unknown

29 August

Following BAC’s One o Clock Scratch the rest of the day has been left totally empty – to be programmed according to whatever absurd and brilliant ideas people come up with over the course of the festival. Just drop into the Forest at any point and tell us your ideas.

Stepping over the threshold

Image via

I’m on the train, gently gliding past the back gardens of red brick houses somewhere on the outskirts of Leeds. The sun is smudge of white light in a pale evening sky. Everything outside feels very far away, an exact 1:1 scale model of the world bathed in perfect sinking sunlight.

My mistake, its York not Leeds.

We’re on our way back from the first trip to Edinburgh in preparation for the summer, now a little bit over two months away. This was a spectacularly brief 5 hour visit; a swift walk and a few sit downs in a very familiar city in unfamiliar sunshine, then back on the train again to head to Bristol. It’s left me feeling a strange mix of nostalgic and excited. Forest Fringe smells the same, it feels the same; if it had been raining it could have been last summer.

Yet it also feels pleasantly different. Not just the double-take acknowledgement of little tweaks and changes (a beautiful new bar nestled in the corner, a familiar face under a new haircut) but a different feeling. Just a little of the armour of almost defensive pluckiness seems to have dropped away. I walked into the hall and it seemed to have opened up its shoulders a bit, it was breathing a little deeper and a little slower.

I stood in the centre of the room, the light cascading in from the enormous uncurtained windows, and for possibly the first time Debbie and myself did our best to explain the full extent of the things we hope will happen in there in two months time. Epic pillow fights, furniture torn to pieces and remade as a house, audiences led singing down into the street, ketchup fuelled Westerns, all night performances, forty one-on-on shows squeezed into every corner of the room, a man dancing across the stage on his 75th birthday, funny things, achingly sad things and some things we don’t know yet and won’t know until the festival has already started. Shapes moved across the empty room, impossibly exciting, spectacularly intimidating. I imagined what I hoped to see, and wondered what I would see.

We actually are in Leeds now.

Forest Fringe will be different this year. Last year we were a dot, a single isolated point. A refuge maybe, from the rain or from the overpriced bars or the militia of purple-clad, Smirnoff-branded, flyerers or just from the unsustainably breathless busyness of, well, everything. And it was nice being a refuge; seeing familiar faces, standing at the door of the venue staring out at the damp street beyond like another country.

This year though we want to step over the threshold. To not simply ignore or avoid the rest of the city but ask how it might be different; how we might look at it differently, how we might remake the way the festival engulfs it. Because it no longer feels like we’re a dot; it feels like we’re part of something that’s growing; points connecting across the city; a new network or shared ideas and shared hopes based on something other than a joint marketing strategy.

Today we walked through the sunshine between Forest Fringe and St Stephen’s Church, the gentle stone giant of a building that until 2008 was occupied by the much-loved Aurora Nova. After a year where it sat sulky and unoccupied it is becoming the festival home of The Arches, Glasgow’s most consistently daring and exciting theatre. They have almost-impossible, stupidly brilliant plans for the festival, including staging the whole of Nic Green’s three-hour-long Trilogy every night; the festival hasn’t seen anything so daring, ambitious and genuinely radical for years.

On the meandering journey between our home and theirs we were also joined by a bunch of folk from BAC, who will once again be supporting and collaborating with Forest Fringe in a whole myriad of ways, without them there’s no way we would have been able to construct the kind of delirious, make-believe programme that we have. Together, we walked the space between these two places. We imagined what we might do in that space; the journeys, stories, adventures that might be constructed around it. We imagined other people walking it; artists, visitors, local people, together looking for something, or just collectively wandering. Already it felt like here was a fragile connection stretching across the city, one to be nurtured and enjoyed. One that can strengthen and grow with every person who walks that gap.

I felt like no one in that conversation was satisfied with a refuge. Everyone knew what they loved about the festival and what they found almost beyond parody; everyone had ideas for what else might happen there. It felt to me like this was the beginning of an attempt to try and make some of that happen, one which more and more people will hopefully become a part of.

With people like BAC and the Arches around in force, collaborating with us, sharing their thoughts and tips and ideas, I’m sure its going to be a good festival. And it’s going to be sunny. I’m sure of it. Gloriously sunny.

Nic Green

If you're around in London on Tuesday I'd recommend you get down to BAC to see Nic Green's complete Trilogy. She performed some sections of it at Forest Fringe last summer and it was one of the most delightful moments of the festival.

Recently Tim Etchell's rightly said on his blog that politics 'shouldn't be left to the realists'. And Nic Green's epic, three part show - historical re-enactment, direct address, singing, dancing, euphoric collective action - is an incredibly inspiring demonstration of what political performance work could and should be. Honest, engaged, funny, inspiring, heartfelt and beautifully realised.

Nic's taking over BAC's enormous Grand Hall for one night and I think it's going to be quite a special moment. I recommend you drop pretty much anything and get a ticket.

If you're not based out of South of England though there's going to be ample opportunity to see (and maybe even be involved) in the show in Edinburgh this summer as brilliantly, the Arches (normally to be found in Glasgow) are going to be presenting it all month out of St Stephen's church as part of their new festival programme. Forest Fringe has all kinds of love for the Arches and we're really excited to have them across town from us.

Oh, and apparently it's going to be a long hot summer. Everything's coming up roses.

Volunteer at Forest Fringe – Reduced prices! Secret shows! The Fame! The Glamour! The improved sense of self worth!

(photo via)

Forest Fringe is an award-winning new venue providing a home for experimentation and play in the midst of the Edinburgh Festival Season. Now in our third year, we’ve supported works-in-progress, one-on-one encounters, beguiling puppet shows, interactive adventures, installations and live art from our beautiful old church hall in the centre of Edinburgh. 

This year the work at Forest Fringe includes internationally renowned companies such as Curious, Third Angel, Rotozaza and Action Hero. We also have a number of other projects lined up, including epic journeys across the country, secret experiences in caves and on the streets of Edinburgh and a series of late night events like nothing else in the city. All still for free or pay what you can.  

We want you involved.  

Forest Fringe receives no public funding.  We exist and thrive on the creativity and passion of our volunteers. Volunteers work alongside the artists at the venue to man our box office, the front of house and to help make the shows happen.  We encourage a collaborative approach to staffing at Forest. As a volunteer, you will help create our venue.  You will often be one of the first points of call for audiences at Forest, or possibly a guide to a show in a hidden corner of the city, and we want you to think as creatively about that as you dare.

This year our perks for volunteers include:  

• A special ticket discount on the Arches programme at St Stephen’s church 
• A heads-up on all Forest Fringe’s secret events during the festival 
• An invite to our free volunteer’s dinner for all those (including the artists) who have worked at the venue 
• The love, admiration and respect of your peers. 
• The chance to discuss theatre with an artist whose work you admire while you help each other do something unglamorous, like recycling.

You are free to do as many or as few shifts as you choose. 

If you’re interested in potentially being a volunteer with us at the Forest Fringe this year, please email ellie[at]forestfringe.co.uk* with your name and contact details. Emailing at this stage does not mean you have to volunteer, just an expression of interest.  You can decide you are too busy at any point.   We look forward to hearing from you!

[*replacing the [at] with the @ symbol]